Informix in WAN?

Hi, everybody, I hope there is someone who can help me or point me to the right direction (at least). We are designing quite huge application and we are using (probably) Informix 7 running under some unix. There will be 160 sites where our software will be installed. And these sites will have to communicate with each other. The communication will be only hundreds of bytes daily and there's no need for online connections. But there will be few (maybe many) different kinds of updates of remote databases. Because of the small amount of data and financial reasons as well we are decided to use dial-up connection among sites. And now comes a question: What mechanism should we use to work with remote databases? We've heard that direct connect to remote database (when we'll have slip/ppp connection) is not very reliable, even when using two phase commit. Is that right? Should we send some scripts and then execute scripts locally? or what? thanx in advance (thanx a lot!) bye erik <steffl@crick.fmed.uniba.sk>